History
of the Department
The
Department of Sociology and Anthropology began in 1957 during
the presidency of V. Raymond Edman under the leadership
of chairman Gordon Jaeck. Formerly, sociology had been a
major in the History and Social Sciences Department and
anthropology had been a major in the archaeology department.
Both majors had already existed for almost two decades.
Sociology
began with Dr. Lamberta Voget who joined the faculty in
1935. Dr. Voget was recognized on campus for her urban sociology
immersion trips to Chicago, and became increasingly popular
among the student body during the social activism in the
1960s. She retired in 1975.
Wheaton
was one of the first liberal arts colleges in the country
to offer anthropology courses and was the first Christian liberal
arts college to have an anthropology major which
was popular from its beginning. Billy Graham (’43) is probably
the most well-known graduate in anthropology. Several sociology
and anthropology graduates have teaching careers in colleges
and universities around the country.
The
Sociology and Anthropology Department has established a
unique identity because of its focus on contemporary social
and cross-cultural issues along with solid training in statistics,
theory, and the subfields of the disciplines. A major in
sociology or anthropology complements and fits nicely with
the Human Needs and Global Resources (HNGR) certificate
program and the Wheaton in Chicago semester. The department’s
cross-cultural focus and emphasis on social concerns help
to prepare students for cross-cultural and domestic vocations
in education, social service, teaching and missions. Recognizing
the importance of the social and cultural dimensions of
heath care, many students have gone on to graduate work
in nursing, public health and medicine and have become physicians,
nurses and public health specialists.
The
combined department offers several general education courses
that fulfill the requirements of the social science cluster.
The
department ranks 14th in the Franklin and Marshall
report on the baccalaurette origins of Ph.D.s with 62 Wheaton
graduates having earned PhDs in sociology and anthropology
between 1920 and 1995 (following in rank order, Oberlin,
Reed, Barnard, Beloit, Radcliffe, Swarthmore, Antioch, Vassar,
Bryn Mayr, Smith, Wellesley, Carleton, and Pomona).
Students
from the department continue to be accepted into competitive
graduate programs at a rate comparative to the best schools
in the country. The first fifty years of the Sociology
and Anthropology program has laid a strong foundation for
both current and future generations of students.
The
general goal of the department is to develop a biblical foundation
for understanding social interaction both within American
society and across cultures. The Sociology faculty recognize
the need to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ at several
levels of social interaction. The micro level involves face-to-face
communication, for example, in marriage or the family; the
middle-range level reflects activities in organizations or
social movements; and the macro level presents issues of culture
and societal structures. At each level, social processes such
as socialization, stratification, urbanization, and social
disorganization are examined. The anthropology faculty emphasize
both the particularities of varying cultural systems, as well
as the universal characteristics of humans made in the image
of God. Recognizing culture as a set of only partial solutions
to human problems, Wheaton's Anthropology faculty also examine
the ways in which the gospel and culture can operate jointly
to explain human adaptations in different societies. Similarly,
Anthropology's exploration of human universals is based on
a distinctively Christian perspective, combining a biblical
orientation with empirical precision.